A presentation / idea for an observatory* / discourse analysis around Open Data in Cyprus / a microhistorical approach: series of local case studies / initial stage of development for a meta-app [APP0] on open data, data freedom, and local infopolitics [someone has to do this]

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A presentation / idea for an observatory* / discourse analysis around Open Data in Cyprus / a microhistorical approach: series of local case studies / initial stage of development for a meta-app [APP0] on open data, data freedom, and local infopolitics [someone has to do this]

over these past couple of years i've been working on collecting parliament datafrom official publicationsputting it together and labelling itgiving it structureso that it can be consumed by computersso that it can be manipulatedso as to be consumed by laypeoplei've published all of my work online under a free-software licensethe harvester, the data itself, and the apps I've built on top of the dataso i wanna talk a bit about the chasm between what i do and what NGOs and the government and companies dothe contrast between array and disarraythe context within which the opening up of knowledge is understoodon the one hand we have organisations working inside this deeply hierarchical networkthey receive fundingbe it from the EUbe it in grantsbe it through investingthey share an ontologythen we have people like me who've not managed to properly infiltrate the networkwho've fallen by the wayside a tiny bitfor whatever reason(this isn't a source of income)who've not really thought this throughwho've adopted the vocabulary of their mastersbut with different connotationsi might attempt to justify what i do as a push towards transparencybut this is disingenuouselementarily because it can't have an impact(this is probably the first time any of you have ever even heard about this)but even if it did have an impactevidence has shown it's usually not the desired impactthat is, civic apps tend to underscore the worst of public dealingsincreasing dissatisfaction among the public with how the {village,city,district,government,world} is runreinforcing the gap between the powerful and powerlessbe it indirectlymaybe because we're unable to convert the information that is given to us into knowledgewe don't really know how to affect changewe truly are dispossessedbut do we actually want to affect changeor are we looking for something to be part ofi think what we're looking for is intimacyand that's what they're looking for toowe find ours in dissonance, they find theirs in structure

wfdd:

In my mind a pretty big issue with open data is provenance. Formal structures carry a certain sense of authority which might be difficult to shake off. Projects like Who's On First, which do attempt to encode a multiplicity of - say - overlapping or conflicting entities, stop short of associating individual entities with their sources. I think this might be in part attributable to the observable difficulty of programmatically traversing deeply nested structures. (Inline citations would introduce an additional level of indirection if they were to accompany their values.) This latter point fits into how programming and formal languages more broadly might shape how we understand the world around us in a feedback loop-y sort of way.

so I understand the term provenance. & I understand there's a kind of ontology involved in relation to provenance. & structures, & metadata. & then a reality feedback look : D